—
LOO BOILED WATER for coffee and gave Marshall a towel and some of her father’s clothes. They were ill-fitting, and when he stepped out of the bathroom, clutching his bundle of soggy belongings, he looked like a kid, the sleeves too long, his clavicle bare. On his feet were a pair of Loo’s own socks. They were orange and blue; she could see a hole in one of the toes.
“Who’s the woman on the walls?” he asked.
“That’s my mother,” said Loo, and instantly regretted it. She’d felt concern for Marshall down on the beach, but now it seemed wrong to have him walking around in her father’s clothes. She wasn’t sure why she’d let him into the house. He was looking too closely at everything, stripping her life to the bone. His eyes rested on each object with an eager curiosity—the chair, the bookcase, the picture hanging on the wall—noticing everything in the room but Loo’s uneasiness.
“Nice rug.”
“We’ve had it forever.”
Marshall bent down and stroked the head of the bear. “He looks pissed.”
“My dad calls it our guard dog.” When they had lived on the road, sleeping in the truck, Hawley would wrap the skin around her like a blanket, and she’d wake up to the bear’s glass eyes staring into her own.
The boy took a step back, as if Hawley’s name might bring the bear to life again. Then he seemed to collect himself, and walked into the kitchen and sat at the small wooden table in Loo’s regular spot, like a customer ready to be served. And Loo was used to serving, and so she poured some coffee, then took Marshall’s clothes and threw them in the dryer. She sat down in Hawley’s chair. She could feel the boy’s eyes watching her, and a prickly sensation started along the back of her neck, as if her body had been dug up from the cold, wet sand and turned out into the glare of the sun.
“You look like your mother.”
“Only when I’m being good.”
It took a moment for Marshall to realize she was not joking. Then he said, “You must always be good.”
Loo spun her mug on the table, round and round her father’s watermark.
“Do you want me to leave?” Marshall asked.
“No,” Loo said. “Just don’t talk about her.”
“All right,” said Marshall. But Loo could tell now that was all he could think of, the woman with the dark hair and green eyes and the bathroom with its bits of paper and photographs and old buttons and dried flowers. She looked over at Marshall’s shoes, which she had set on the windowsill to dry.
“You always wear wing tips when you go to the beach?”
“My mom makes me wear a tie when we go canvassing. I knock on the Republican doors, she knocks on the Democrats’.” There was a bowl of shells in the middle of the kitchen table. Mussels and lady’s slippers and a few small conch that Loo had collected over the years. Marshall chose a lady’s slipper and began to turn it over in his fingers, the shell lined with purple, the inside thick as cream.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” said Marshall. “People don’t even try to be polite. They just slam the door in your face.”
“Like me.”
“Like you,” said Marshall. “Like everybody. I’d rather be drawing, or out on the water, but it’s important to my mom.”
Loo pressed her fingers around the mug. Although she didn’t like Mary Titus, she was still curious about her, in the way that she was curious about all mothers. On the street, at the beach or in the supermarket she watched them change diapers, wipe mouths, fix hair, tie shoes, apply suntan lotion, break up fights and endure tantrums, sometimes fussing with kisses and hugs and sometimes cursing at or hitting their children or ignoring them completely. Even in their neglect, these women seemed powerful.
“What will she do? When she finds out you lost the signatures?”
“I don’t know.” Marshall put the shell back in the bowl. “When I was little we’d go around protesting with my stepfather. But after he left, my mom stopped caring. She got really depressed. For a while she even checked herself into an institution. I had to go live with my aunt. Then Whale Heroes happened and my stepfather was on TV, and my mom got so mad that she snapped out of it. She started working on the petition. She said she wanted to make her own mark on the world.”
“What about your real dad?”
“What about him?”
“She told me he was a fisherman.”
“He died when I was little,” said Marshall.
“Do you remember him?”
“Sure,” said Marshall, glancing over at the bathroom. “But knowing them doesn’t always make it better.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think he wanted a family. I mean, he loved my mom. But mostly I just remember him making excuses to leave us.”
Marshall’s eyes floated down to Loo’s star chart, set underneath the sugar bowl as a coaster. “Is that a planisphere?”
Loo nodded.
The boy picked up the wheel, and Loo watched him spin the dial to the correct day and month. She still remembered the first time she’d used it, watching a meteor shower from the balcony of a roadside motel. The chart in her hands. The desert an orchestra of light over her head. Some of the meteors were thin white lines shooting through the blackness, others were giant, shimmering blazes that flashed straight down to the horizon. She remembered feeling an overwhelming sense of alignment. As if holding something that had belonged to her mother allowed Loo to reach through time. Something is making this happen, she’d thought. The whole world is alive and moving and I was meant to be here doing exactly this.
Marshall lifted the planisphere to the window. Small pinpricks of sun shone through the plastic and onto the kitchen table. Loo touched his arm, her hand resting for a moment on the fabric of her father’s shirt, a navy-blue plaid she had washed without thinking for years but now noticed was the same color as Marshall’s eyes. A loose thread was hanging from the end of the sleeve, and she reached for it, thinking, This is right, this is right, pulling until the string came loose in her hand, separating from the shirt.
Marshall leaned closer. Loo felt his breath on her cheek. Saw his lips open. Then his eyes fixed on something behind her shoulder and he stopped. He lifted the arm she’d been tugging at, and pointed at the kitchen counter, where a .357 Magnum was resting between the breadbox and a bowl full of fruit.
He said, “Is that real?”
“Oh,” said Loo. “Yes. You want to see it?” She went over to the counter and picked up the revolver. She checked to see if it was loaded, then set it in front of Marshall. The boy stared at the .357 for a moment, then picked it up, weighing the metal in his hands.
“Heavy.”
“They always are.”